Education, From The Capitol To The Classroom

Stories about students: How does education policy affect the way students learn and grow? Can schools meet their needs as they balance ramped-up testing with personal changes and busy schedules? And are students who need help getting it?

Stories about educators: How are those responsible for implementing education policy in schools − from classroom teachers, to district administrators, to school board members − affected by changes at the top? And how well do they meet their challenge of reaching students with varying abilities and needs?

Stories about school assessment: With an increased push for 'accountability' in schools, what can test scores tell us about teacher effectiveness and student learning − and what can't they tell us? What does the data say about how schools at all levels are performing?

Stories about government influence: Who are the people and groups most instrumental in crafting education policy? What are their priorities and agendas? And how do they work together when they disagree?

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Stories about money: How do local, state, and federal governments pay to support the education policies they craft? How do direct costs of going to school − from textbooks to tuition − hit a parent or student's bottom line? And how do changing budgets and funding formulas affect learning and teaching?

IPS currently operates 18 magnet schools, with each offering a different curriculum designed to reach specific sets of student interests and needs. IPS plans to open two more magnet schools next year.

With school vouchers and charters gaining the most attention from education policymakers in recent years, magnet schools seem to have gotten lost in the shuffle. But is it possible magnet schools could be a better way to improve student performance than either vouchers or charters?

Study from the Public Policy Institute of California found that magnet schools had a higher positive impact on math scores than "choice" schools generally (schools other than the public school a student would attend based on district boundaries). The "crosses" on the chart indicate scores.

Some studies have found magnet students outperform charter or voucher students:

A 2006 report from the Public Policy Institute of California found the achievement gains of students at magnet schools in math were higher than those of students at choice schools (in the case of the study, mostly charters and open-enrollment in other public schools), shown in the chart on the right.

Another study from Connecticut found that a $2 billion expansion of magnet schools in the state’s poorest cities helped students do better on math and reading tests.

A Chicago teacher wrote in the New York Times that, by attracting the highest-performing students into magnet schools, mainline public schools suffer:

When educational leaders decided to create magnet schools, they didn’t just get it wrong, they got it backwards. They pulled out the best and brightest from our communities and sent them away. The students who are part of the “great middle” now find themselves in an environment where the peers who have the greatest influence in their school are the least positive role models… What should have been done was to pull out the bottom ten percent. Educational leaders could have greatly expanded the alternative school model and sent struggling students to a place that had been designed to meet their educational needs. Now, hundreds of millions of dollars later, we are no closer to meeting the needs of the struggling student.